When you haven’t changed your curriculum in 150 years, at some point you look around,” said Elena Kagan, the dean of Harvard Law.

The impetus for the changes is the sense that what has been taught and how it has been taught may be “embarrassingly disconnected from what anybody does,” Ms. Kagan said.

Those concerns were highlighted in a report on legal education published this year by the Carnegie Foundation. The report found that law schools generally stressed analytic training over ethical, interpersonal and other skills that could help them practice law after graduation.

This comes as no surprise to those of us in law school or practicing as lawyers. My (our) response is “ya think?!” But in the middle of the week from hell, I can only laugh. And then go back to engaging in legal reasoning disconnected from my real world future practice.